Bird of the Year fraud detected
First it was the Russians interfering in the US election, now voting irregularities have been uncovered in the Bird of the Year contest.
The voter fraud was detected by Wellingtonbased statistical analysts Dragonfly Data Science, which has also run programmes to track votes in real elections in this country, the United States and United Kingdom.
Scientist Yvan Richard, who was running the programme, noticed a big spike in votes for the white-faced heron around midnight after the first day of voting on October 9.
There was also another smaller spike around 11am on October 10.
Altogether 112 votes were found to have come from the one IP address, somewhere in the Christchurch area.
The white-faced heron fan used a random email generator, so all the votes came from different email addresses, Bird of the Year co-ordinator Kimberley Collins said.
The rule was only one vote per person, so all but one vote from the offending IP address had been deleted.
Security on the competition website had also been updated.
No other strange voting patterns had been detected, Collins said.
‘‘We’re not angry. We’re just impressed they were able to do that and they care enough about a bird to do it.’’
Organisers didn’t expect the fraudulent voter to come forward but suggested he or she might like to make a donation to Forest & Bird’s Givealittle page Our Native Birds Need You.
Without the dodgy votes, the white-faced heron had just 30 votes shortly after 8am on October 11.
The kea was streaking ahead with 2292 votes, while the kereru¯ had 1101. Voting closes on October 23.
It’s not the first time the Bird of the Year has been rocked by dodgy voting.
In 2015, two 15-year-old twin sisters managed to use their parents’ business account to make hundreds of fake emails.
They used these emails to the benefit of the ko¯ kako.